Friday, July 6, 2012

July 6 - Blogging GC'12

I will err this morning in the opposite direction from the past two mornings -- so, on the shorter side. Legislative committees begin meetings at 7:30 this morning.

We had an interesting discussion of Holy Women, Holy Men (HWHM) yesterday in my committee. This is a book of celebrations and commemorations that has been in trial use since the 2009 General Convention. Several members on the committee echoed concerns expressed in testimony that we heard in our hearing, that HWHM offers materials that are very uneven. (Apparently it is impossible to chant some of the collects! That's all *I* need to know.) Some are concerned as well about the shear number of new celebrations -- one bishop referred to "drinking from a fire hose."

Local commemorations are already allowed when authorized by the diocesan bishop. So here's a problem for you:

* If we should limit the number of church-wide (rather than local) commemorations so that we do not over-crowd the calendar, how would you draw the line between holiness of life and heroism of service which may be inspiring but not necessarily "holy"?

We endorsed continued trial use and encouraged careful study of these resources.

The committee also sent to the House of Bishops a resolution that would privide for creating a task force to study the current state of marriage. This will probably stir some controversy. The suspicion on the part of some traditionalists is that this task force may be just a device for delivering a pre-determined result: recommendation of marriage equality for same-sex couples.

In the legislative session of the House of Deputies in the afternoon, we passed a resolution directing the legislative committee on budget to reserve $300,000 for the Episcopal Youth Event (EYE). This would restore some funding for youth. The budget proposal released earlier by (or on behalf of) Executive Council implied EYE would not receive a budget.

Finally, there was an interesting story in Episcopal News Service on the resolutions coming forward concerning Israel/Palestine. It is a long article, but it covers the discussion well, and it summarizes the main points early in the story: